Balwant Singh Rajoana, the Babbar Khalsa International terrorist sentenced to death in the 1995 assassination of then Punjab chief minister Beant Singh, should hang as scheduled on March 31, a Chandigarh court ruled Tuesday.
The court returned the warrant of death of Rajoana to the Patiala jail authorities. The court also issued a showcause notice for contempt of court to Patiala prison jail superintendent L.S. Jakhar.
Patiala jail superintendent L.S. Jakhar had earlier returned the warrant of death issued by the court saying that the legal circumstances of the Beant Singh assassination case were such that Rajoana could not be hanged till the Supreme Court decided all related issues.
The matter of two other terrorists, Jagtar Singh Hawara and Lakhwinder Singh, convicted in the same case, is pending before the Supreme Court. The CBI has approached the Supreme Court in Hawara’s case as his death sentence, awarded by the CBI special court in 2007, was commuted by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 2010 to life imprisonment. The appeal of Lakhwinder Singh against his conviction is also pending.
However, the high court had upheld Rajoana’s death sentence in the case as he had refused to defend himself.
The Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of the Sikh religion, had last week asked the Punjab government and the SGPC to initiate steps to save Rajoana from the gallows.
Beant Singh, a former Punjab chief minister (1992-95), who was largely credited with wiping out terrorism from Punjab, was assassinated by a human bomb, Dilawar Singh, at the high security Punjab civil secretariat here Aug 31, 1995.
While Hawara was the mastermind of the assassination, Rajoana was the second human bomb to be used in case the first assassin failed. Rajoana, during the entire 11-year trial, had admitted that he alone was responsible for the killing of Beant Singh.
The family members of Beant Singh have also stated that they had forgiven Rajoana and that his death sentence be converted to life imprisonment.
slightly incorrect the family havent requested the death sentance to be converted to life inprisonment.